And No One Sings Me Lullabyes
by That Buggy Girl
Summary: What if you were born different in a world where every one was meant to be the same? It could be your undoing...Or your destiny. Every great journey starts with a humble beginning. [Warnings: childabuse and violence]
1. Clip 1

**Author's Note:** "Lullabyes" is a fic I started writing back around Christmastime of 2006. It's a Naaza backstory based on some small bits of canon character things, my own theories, research of 16th century Japan and other fitting things. It will be posted in really small bits I'm calling "clips." I'm not sure if I'll ever actually finish it, but enjoy anyway.

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It was a terrified shriek that roused him for the first time, the high pitched yell that came with the discovery of a child's bloody body on the forest floor.

Of course, he never knew he was the cause of that shriek because he was the body, beaten and bruised and left for dead.

A woman's trembling voice asked if he was alive. He couldn't answer even if he wanted to; his jaw ached. Couldn't turn his head and open his eyes to look at the person who'd found him, either. One eye was swollen shut, the other so bruised it would be a miracle if he could ever see again.

The voice asked again if he was alive, growing a little more shrill with each passing second.

He tried to move, but his fragile body protested; every tiny movement was agony. A small mewl of pain slipped through his blood-crusted lips and the voice gasped in surprise. Or maybe it was horror; he had no way of telling. Footsteps scuffled through the leaves as the girl who'd found him paced, assessing the situation and how to handle it.

The footsteps retreated after a little while and he was certain he'd been left to die a second time.

He had no way of knowing how much time passed, but it felt like an eternity before the steps returned, accompanied by a heavier footfall. Two voices were talking now, but he was too young and tired to understand everything they were speaking of.

His body screamed in agony as he was suddenly lifted from the ground without warning. A pathetic whimper was all he could manage at the jarring movement, but it was lost among the voices of the big people who'd found him. The pain continued as he was jostled about, intensifying until the world faded away to nothing.


	2. Clip 2

When he came to again, it was to the sound of hushed voices talking somewhere above him. This time, he was able to slit one eye open, though his vision was unfocused and it felt like his eyelid weighed a ton.

He tried to move to look around, but the second he turned his head, pain sang through his body again. A pathetic cry escaped him at the pain and he wondered if that was really his voice. It sounded so far away…

Suddenly, the big people were hovering over him, looking down, and he could sort of make out their blurry forms, if he tried really hard. "I found him in the woods." The girl's voice was saying, "He was laying there, covered in blood, and I thought he was dead. It looks like some one beat him within an inch of his life." There was something in her voice; something that made him uneasy, but he was too young to know the correct word for it.

"He's so small…" Another woman's voice, a different one this time, "Who would do that to a child?" Worry in this one's voice…He could recognize that. "Are you sure an animal didn't do it?"

"There are no scratches or bite marks on him, so I doubt it." The man butted in, "Somebody beat this child pretty badly and left him there to die."

"He passed out on the way back here. We tended his wounds; bound the ones that needed it." The girl spoke up, "I cleaned him as best I could, but he's still in need of a proper bath when he's well enough. He was covered in blood and dirt. It's still caked in his hair…"

"Go out and gather more herbs, Izumi. We'll have to redress the wounds later." The other woman's voice was moving as she headed off in a different direction, "It will be a miracle if he survives."

"At least the fever has broken..." Izumi commented as her voice drifted away after the other woman's.

A smell like something 'kaasan cooked drifted through the room. It was the first time he'd thought of 'kaasan over the past few days; they'd been too full of agony to think of anything else but how much it hurt to be alive. His thoughts were incredibly simplistic; two years of life didn't often lead to complicated thinking. He thought mostly of the things a small boy does; of katana and being a brave samurai and putting bugs in 'neesan's hair.

'Kaasan had never been very kind to him. It had something to do with the way he looked, something he didn't understand. He heard 'kaasan and 'tousan arguing and shouting, usually over him, and he didn't understand. No one played with him. He'd endured all the bad things silently; the kicks and slaps and tugging on his hair were all his fault, somehow. And then one day…the big men had come and hurt him and then he woke up when Izumi started screaming.

The big men had been 'tousan's friends. He remembered them being around the house before. His brothers spoke with them like they were adults, but every one pushed him out of the room when he tried to be a big boy too. 'Kaasan slapped him for that one, sending him outside and telling him to get out of her sight.

It had been cold outside that day, he remembered. He had sat on the porch, shivering and wondering what he'd done wrong. 'Kaasan was always so angry with him. He tried to be a good boy; tried to act like his brothers and 'neesan. He listened to 'kaasan and 'tousan and did everything they asked of him, but it just wasn't enough. There was something he was failing to do and he was too young to understand what that might be.

Izumi returned later in the day, followed by many other small footsteps and young voices. There was a moment when, through a pain-induced haze, he almost thought he was at home, surrounded by his own siblings. It smelled like home. It was noisy like home. Except…In this home, the children said "mama" and "papa" and nobody was yelling at him.

The other children crowded around him, curious. He looked up at them blearily, straining to make out their faces. They were all talking back and forth, speculating about who he was, what had happened to him and where he might have come from, and all of the noise simply added to the confusion rushing through his overtaxed mind. He wanted to tell them to leave him alone, but he didn't have the words.

The realization that he indeed was not at home and that some one had HURT him so badly that he couldn't move was suddenly very real and very frightening. The children were all talking at once, raising their voices to speak over one another, and their voices were beginning to jumble together. His vision was growing cloudy from straining so hard to see properly. He was tired, he was hungry and everything –**everything**- hurt.

So he did what any small child would and burst into tears.


	3. Clip 3

Over the next day or so, Izumi became his constant companion and self-appointed caregiver. Since the girl never stopped talking, he learned that she was the oldest girl in the family, that she was twelve, and that she had the oh-so-important job of looking after her smaller brothers and sisters. There were three brothers and two sisters and two of the brothers were older than Izumi. He never did learn all of their names. Papa was a farmer and Mama and the children helped him plant and harvest the sweet potatoes every year.

Izumi liked to talk. Sometimes, she would question him, asking him where he was from and what his name was and what happened to him. She didn't care that he never answered the hundreds of questions she asked. Usually, she answered them herself, chattering on and on. She reasoned that he was too small to be able to talk properly; that he didn't know his own name yet. That he probably forgot what happened to him and didn't know where his home was, anyway.

It gave him a bit of a headache, listening to her all day long.

She helped him eat. It hurt for him to sit up still, and the hand he usually ate with was bandaged, making his little boy fingers even more clumsy than usual. So she fed him as if he were a baby, which he hated, and he was too weak to do anything about it.

Several times throughout the course of the day, she changed the dressings on his wounds. The old bandages needed to be peeled off carefully and the injuries cleaned before being rewrapped. A foul smelling poultice was spread on a gash on his left leg and the bitter smell of herbs filled his nostrils all day long. Izumi wrapped a rough bandage full of new tea leaves around his arm, informing him that the tea would help prevent an ugly scar running from his wrist to elbow.

He surprised himself by recognizing some of the scents, not by name, but as things which 'kaasan had used when 'tousan and his eldest brothers got hurt training. Though he couldn't see very well what she was doing –his right eye was still too swollen to open- he could smell the difference in the plants she ground, soaked, brewed and spread across his wounds.

Izumi talked about the herbs as well, telling him what they were and what they were used for. This one for keeping wounds clean, that one for helping them heal quickly. This one to reduce swelling, that one to help set the wound. He tried to listen carefully; to match names to smells, but his young mind just couldn't hold on to the information for that long.

Izumi was always gentle with him, never rough like 'kaasan had been. Izumi's hands were careful and kind, always trying to make the hurts feel better. Sometimes she sang to him while she worked, little nonsense songs and children's ditties. He'd never heard any one sing before; every one at home was far too serious. She made him feel happy and he would have smiled, if it did not hurt to do so.

He had been dressed in new clothes. They weren't as finely made as his old ones, but he learned that the silks he'd been wearing had been bloody and torn beyond repair and were thrown away. The new clothes were rough and chaffed, agitating his wounds further.

"Do you want to go outside?" Izumi asked him one day as she finished binding the gash on his leg, "Papa says you are well enough to be moved and that some fresh air would do you well."

He blinked up at her blearily; no one in this house had ever asked him what he wanted. Izumi asked many questions, but Papa and Mama and the brothers and sisters usually talked over him. The youngest child in Izumi's family was five already, and referred to him as "that baby."

"I'll get Daichi to bring you out." She said without bothering to wait for an answer and he tried to remember which brother that was. She knew better than to expect any response. In the week he'd been recovering in their house, he'd never so much as uttered a word. She wasn't sure if he even could speak, but she was certain he could hear; he was so attentive.

He tried to prop himself as she wandered off, but fell back on the pallet with a frustrated sigh. He was still too weak to hold himself up and it was driving him mad. Though he was small, he had been able to move about on his own for over a year and this sudden immobility was incredibly exasperating.

Daichi smelled of soil. The thought crossed his mind as the young man lifted him from the bedding and carried him outside. Soil, and sweet potatoes. It was an earthy smell; woodsy. Not a smell like home. Everything was so unfamiliar. So different. But he could adapt and was getting used to it.

He was set on the ground, propped up against a log. It was cold again; he hated the cold. It always took him so long to warm up again. He looked up. The sky was overcast and grey. It didn't smell like rain, though. The greyness was the coming winter, the chill that hung in the air.

He breathed in. The air itself was cool. Breathed out, fascinated by the puff of his breath that clouded in front of him. He was too small to remember his first winter, but he was already displeased about the approaching one.

Izumi was busy gathering herbs at the edge of the woods. He could tell it was her by the color of her kimono. He knew what she was doing because the tangy aroma of the plant she was picking drifted along on the cool air. Her younger brothers scampered by, pretend sword fighting and he wished he could join in. His own brothers never played like that; they were too busy doing important big boy things and he was too small to help.

It was…nice here. Nicer than home. He tipped his head towards the sky again, watching the blurry image of a bird darting through the grey sky, and thought how wonderful it would be if this were his new family and no one yelled at him ever again.


	4. Clip 4

"He is well enough to be bathed."

Though his right eye was still puffy and tender, the vision in his left eye was almost back to normal and he was able to watch curiously as Papa and Daichi brought in buckets of water to be heated. Mama brought out a wooden tub to be filled for his bath and Izumi gathered all the things she would need to scrub him clean; the foul smelling soap, soft cloths for washing and drying him, fresh bandages for rewrapping the lingering wounds.

Izumi had wanted to clean him up the day they had found him, but Papa had said the wounds were too severe and that he needed time to heal. He didn't see what the big deal about being clean was; he didn't have many baths at home. But Izumi was concerned with all of the blood still caked in his hair and had been asking her parents when he would be well enough for a bath.

Today was the day, apparently, and though it was chilly outside, the bathwater was heated and Izumi began stripping him of bandages and clothing. He stood naked and shivering, waiting to be lifted into the warm water.

Izumi tied back her sleeves and set him gently in the wooden tub, chattering all the while about how she was responsible for making sure the little brother and sisters were bathed as well. She was an expert at cleaning them, she bragged, when the occasion rose that they needed to be clean. He only half-listened, swirling his little fingers in the water and watching the dirt of the forest floor melt away.

There was blood under his fingernails, and grime, and he picked at that, trying to dig it all out. Izumi lathered him up and scrubbed his skin with a rough scrap of clothe. Who knew he was so pale beneath it all? His freshly-cleaned flesh shone whitely, tinted amber by the glow of the room's fire. He was amazed at how different clean felt.

He splashed a little as she soaped his hair, her work-toughened fingers digging into his scalp. His hair had been matted with blood and incredibly snarled. Izumi had commented many times that he would look better once the blood was gone. She contemplated what he might look like under the grime as she scrubbed, chattering cheerfully as she worked.

Until he ducked under the water and came up with his hair in a sopping mess, plastered to his forehead.

He shook his head to get his hair out of his face and blinked, smiling shyly up at Izumi. She simply gaped back at him, really seeing him for the first time now that he was clean, eyes wide and round, mouth hanging open in shock. The shriek was welling up from somewhere within her and as the volume of it increased, his hands came up and clamped over his ears. What was she doing? It wasn't very funny, whatever the joke was.

"Demon!" Her finger flashed out, pointing, accusing, and she backed up, "Demon; he's a demon in disguise! Papa!" The call for her father rose like a siren wail, growing more and more shrill and frightening him.

He didn't know what he had done. Izumi had that look on her face that 'kaasan had when she looked at him, somewhere between frightened and horrified and hatred.

Papa, Mama and Daichi rushed into the room, followed by the brothers and sisters, who crowded in the doorway, jostling to see better. Papa was wielding a hoe, and he pushed Izumi back out of the way. Mama grabbed Izumi and hugged her close, protective. Daichi boldly strode forwards, standing beside Papa. Matching sets of mossy brown eyes glared down at him and he felt his insides turning to ice.

He looked between them uncertainly, lower lip quivering. This was like being at home, where he did things that were bad and never knew what they were.


	5. Clip 5

It was cold.

He was already starting to forget the brief interlude of peace at Izumi's house, when he was helpless and injured and no one yelled at him. He'd been put out of the house that very night, still damp and confused, with no explanation of why or what he had done. He'd been crying and scared and Papa had roughly told him it was no use; the innocent act wouldn't work.

A demon, Izumi had called him. He couldn't understand why. 'Kaasan had said the same thing once or twice and he never knew why they were calling him that. Demons were ugly and scary and hurt people. They crept into houses at night and ate children. They destroyed whole armies with magic. He was and could do none of those things.

Memories of those few days where he was warm and full were being replaced by a cold numbness. All he knew was hunger and fear. The frost on the ground burned his little feet as he wandered, looking for food and a warm, dry place to sleep.

Most people ignored him. Or threw things at him. He didn't know how many rocks had hit him, or how many farmers had chased him out of their fields, waving gardening tools and yelling at him.

The weather was turning even more; he could feel the increasing chill in the air. The flat grey of the sky was far from comforting and left him frightened. What would he do if it rained? There was nowhere to go. Everywhere he went, people edged away from him or told him to keep moving, they wanted no demons there.

'Tousan had always said taking what was not his was wrong, but he saw no other way. Not every farmer could be in every field all the time, and he had to eat something. He was far too young to know which plants in the woods were safe, but he was old enough to know the things coming from fields wouldn't harm him.

His hands were soon once again caked with dirt from digging up the small and scraggly plants left behind at the harvest. Most of what he found was soft or half-rotted, but his hungry belly didn't allow him to be picky.

He wasn't sure which was worse, the cold or the hunger.

The chill to the air made him lethargic. He seemed to be constantly in a waking dream, stumbling through a village or the forest with heavy-lidded eyes. He spent most of his days looking for a warm place to sleep, for that was all he wanted to do. The constant hunger gnawing at his stomach was nothing compared to the unrelenting cold. He could feel it seeping through his small body, chilling him to the very bone.

It was easier, he decided, to find food than a warm place to sleep. Most nights, he would huddle beneath a bush or in a corner or beneath a porch, wrapping the bloodied, soiled yukata he'd been found in tighter around him in an attempt to keep warm. His teeth were always chattering and he couldn't seem to stop shivering.

It was only a matter of time before there was no warmth left in him at all.


	6. Clip 6

He woke up feeling warm and dry and indoors. There were people somewhere in another room; he could hear them talking. But they were speaking in a strange language, which he did not understand. The voices were loud and booming, but jovial.

He sat up, looking down at the thick blanket he'd been tucked under, then taking in his surroundings. Though his vision was still cloudy, he could see that the room was fairly empty. There was a wooden trunk in the corner and a small, low table with papers and feathers scattered across the top of it.

Pushing back the blanket, he rose from the bedding to investigate the new surroundings. His legs wobbled slightly beneath him, and he wavered for a moment, teetering on the brink of collapse, but grabbed the table to steady himself. He was suddenly aware of the hunger gnawing at his stomach, the fact that he was wearing a pristine white yukata and the idea that he had no clue where he was.

The loud, laughing voices were drawing closer and suddenly the door slid open, revealing two fat men in brown robes. He froze where he was, hands still planted on the edge of the table, and looked up in fear.

"Ah, you are awake." The taller man smiled at him, then turned to the other man and spoke the strange words. The other man nodded and turned around the way they had come and the taller man entered the room. "We have been very worried about you, _menino; _you had such a high fever." He smiled kindly, "We did not think you would wake up."

He let himself fall back among the bedding, looking up at the man in confusion. He was a strange looking man, with tanned skin and a fringe of thick, dark hair, his head crowned with a shiny bald spot. His robes were rough and brown and belted at the waist with a thick rope and he wore a piece of wood on a cord round his neck.

"I am Father Teodoro," He continued, "Do you have a name, _menino_?"

He looked up at the man called Father Teodoro and blinked. A name…Did he have one? 'Kaasan and 'tousan must have called him something. He searched his mind, trying to remember what he had been called. "Demon" and "brat" stuck out first and foremost in his mind, but he knew neither of them were proper names.

He shrugged.

Father Teodoro nodded. "We will figure that out later." He sat on the floor, facing him, and propped his chin on a hand. "Can you speak, _menino_?"

Though his voice had been in disuse for quite some time, he managed a small squeak of "hai," which seemed to please the big man, who smiled, showing off his large, white teeth. "How old are you?"

He held up two small fingers.

"Such a shame; so young…" Father Teodoro muttered some of the strange words to himself, shaking his head softly, "Do you have a family?"

"Hai." He had 'kaasan and 'tousan and 'neesan and all his brothers, somewhere. He had no clue where "somewhere" was, though.

"Who is your father?"

" 'Tousan." He said simply. He knew no other name for his father, after all; he was too young to realize his parents had other names besides their familial titles.

Father Teodoro simply looked at him for a moment, a small frown on his face. He stared right back, peering into the murky brown eyes of the man. "We will do our best to find the people you belong with, _menino_. Until then, you may stay here with Brother Manuel and I, where it is warm and safe. You would like that, yes?"

He nodded, biting his lip.

Perhaps this would be better than being at Izumi's house.


End file.
